Manuel Blahnik RodrÃguez, to give him his full name, was born in 1942 in Santa Cruz de La Palma – the second largest city on the fifth largest, and the fifth most populous, of the Canary Islands.
His Czech father had left Prague in the 1930s to avoid rising fascism, but it was in the 1950s after the Communists took charge that his grandparents disappeared. His mother was Spanish; her family owned a banana plantation in Santa Cruz.
© Haydn Thompson 2021